The National Security Agency's (NSA) controversial collection of phone records has gone dark.

As of 11:59 p.m. ET on Saturday, the NSA was forced to stop the bulk collection of phone metadata under the terms of the USA Freedom Act. The agency will be allowed to hold on to all metadata it's collected in the last five years until the end of February in order to ensure "data integrity."

The move is viewed as an important victory among privacy advocates, who were concerned that the feds were collecting far too much information they did not need. Phone metadata includes originating and terminating phone numbers, mobile subscriber identity numbers, calling card numbers, as well as time and duration of call. Its collection made headlines in 2013 after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released documents that detailed how government agencies got their hands on it.

Officials originally defended the collection, saying that call details—like actual conversations—were not part of the metadata. But it was the scope that caught many peoples' attention. A 2013 Verizon order, for example, requested all phone data from the provider for a three-month period, which seemed excessive to some.

This uproar prompted President Obama last year to publicly pledge an overhaul of phone metadata collection. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the president's request, but it needed congressional approval to go into effect. That happened in June, and Obama signed the bill, which required an end to bulk metadata collection by Nov. 28.

In a statement to Reuters on Saturday, Ned Price, a spokesman for the President's National Security Council, said the Freedom Act delivers "a reasonable compromise" that protects privacy and the country.

Under the new rules, bulk collection is banned, but court orders can now be obtained that would allow the government to access phone information from cellular providers. That surveillance is allowed for up to six months before another court order must be obtained.

As ZDNet explained, however, there might be ways that the NSA can get around this ban.

Related

The recent Paris terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people, have reignited the debate over how much surveillance is too much, or too little. In a new campaign ad, Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, is criticizing his GOP presidential rival Ted Cruz for voting for the USA Freedom Act. The bill "eventually undermines our ability to collect information and to monitor those who seek to harm the United States," Rubio said, according to Politico.

Snowden, meanwhile, believes the metadata change is a "profound" victory for the U.S.

"After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated," Snowden wrote in an op-ed earlier this year. "This is the power of an informed public."

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